Category Archives: Essays

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Hotel Transylvania, Plot, and Storytelling

Michael and I watched Hotel Transylvania last night.  I’d been seeing it off and on since it came out on DVD in various tester screens in the stores, and what I saw looked interesting and funny.

I was right.  It’s a lighthearted, cute and at times hilarious movie, and for a while I wondered why it hadn’t reached greater heights, like Shrek and Finding Nemo.

Once I started to think critically about it, it was easy to pinpoint the troubles, and they are very, very relevant to storytelling and pacing.  Here are the three big reasons that I think Hotel Transylvania, despite being a really great film to watch to detox off of the intensity of Game of Thrones, didn’t do as well as it could have.

#3 Wonky Pacing.

The story is adorable and we get the jist of the set up very quick.  Dracula has a little girl and he adores her.  Except, the set up is long.  Like, the opening of the movie is probably 5 to 10 minutes of Dracula adorably doting on his little girl, singing her songs, playing with her, teaching her to fly… but like I said, the jist is super simple.  They could have cut that set up in half, easy.

Slow wind ups do not an engrossing movie make.  We need to be dumped in to stories, akin to a child jumping on a slide.  Do you think it’s a good slide if you push off and then stop start your way down to the bottom?  Um, no, you want a fast, smooth ride which gets your heart pounding immediately.  (I miss being short enough that playground slides are still the best thing ever.)

This applies to your stories as well.  Make sure the intro gives only the information needed, and nothing more, and then, as they say, get to the monkey.

#2 Who and what is this story about?  

Finding Nemo did a great job of balancing between its characters.  We’d have Dad and Dori, then Nemo and the Fishtank.  It was easy to focus on the main characters.  Hotel Transylvania did a little wandering about it’s main characters.  See, for most of the movie I thought it was all about Dracula.  But by the end of the movie, it was more about his daughter and the love interest, and how they ‘zing’ed.  It had a little bit of a wandering eye.  Some scenes would just be about Dracula’s difficulty in letting his daughter grow up, some about the daughter experiencing love, and some wouldn’t have much to do with either of those themes.

I know it’s fun to put extra goodies in your work, and yeah, I’m totally guilty of it too.  But the fact is, to get a streamlined and fabulous book, you need to choose a character or two and stick with them.  Game of Thrones happens to choose about 20 characters, but you are not G.R.R. Martin and neither am I.  Valeria has 1 main perspective.  Pandora’s Ring has 2.  Sleight of Spirit has 4 (with about 5x the word count, though).  Keep an eye on it.

#1 Filler, Filler, Filler

Ok, I get it.  It was really funny for Dracula and Frankenstein, and daddy Werewolf to just jaw off for ten minutes.  I enjoyed it, I really did.  But at the same time, the story HALTED so that these characters could get off a ton of inside jokes.  The movie was only 90 minutes, so I understand why they did a bit of padding, but I think that they could have done a lot more for the plot by just kissing the jokes, introducing us to the one’s we’d need to know, and then getting on with it.

In our stories, I know those characters like to bounce off each other and have a ton of fun.  If I let my characters go, they get silly, they get melencholy, and I get great stuff out of that, BUT your story probably isn’t there just to be a time passer.  That’s how the book gets put down.  You have to hit fast, hit hard, and then keep hitting.  I know, I know, the books you read in literature class had a lot more time to beat around bushes and dinner parties, but the average reader isn’t looking for that these days.  So make sure you look at every scene, at every sentence, and ask yourself is this moving the plot forward?  

What movie did you guys love, but felt like it just didn’t live up to it’s own potential?

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Quick Bites: To

As I am editing ‘Sword’s Blessings’, the sequel to ‘Pandora’s Ring’, I am thanking my editors for teaching as well as editing.

‘Pandora’s Ring’ was easily edited at first flush, but when you looked deeper it was kind of a mess.  There were a few reasons for it, none of them plotting/pacing/character problems, but just tiny little grammatical things which kept cropping up.

One of those was with the word ‘to’.

You see, ‘to’ can be used in a directional sense, as in “from there to here.”  or “give it to me.”  but it’s also part of the infinitive form of words, and that’s where the problem lies.  I have a tendency to use infinitive form in the wrong places. When you use the infinitive form of a word, you sometimes end up implying that what was going to happen… didn’t.

See here:

She turned to give him the paper.

I would guess that half of you read that just as I would read it.  As in she turned around and gave him the paper.  But I would also imagine that some of you were like “Ok… she turned to give him the paper… but what happened?  What stopped her?”

You see the trouble?  Half of your readers will understand exactly what you meant, half will be like “But WHAT?!  Why didn’t she just give it to him!?”

Therein lies the trouble.  Don’t kick your readers out of the narrative like that.  A 50% keep rate is not ok, so while directional ‘to’ and ‘to infinitive’ which is, in fact about to be followed up by a ‘but…’ are both ok… try and pare down on them otherwise.

Got it?  Great.  Michael will be on tomorrow with Tidbit Tuesday!

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Learning From ‘The Hobbit’

Movie and books are two different creatures.

It’s like the difference between a 30 foot giant with no sense of balance and a cat with infinite agility.

The giant is more impressive, certainly.  But it’s also ungainly.  Clumsy.  It has to walk in a nice straight line or chances are it will trip over itself and come crashing down, bringing everything around it down as well.  The path needs to be clear and uncluttered.  Now, given all this, the giant can do amazing things, perform great feats of storytelling.  In the end, though, it’s restricted by it’s nature.  We can’t blame it for those shortcomings, only make room the best we can.

Now, a cat is fine too.  It’s small, more agile.  A cat can wiggle it’s way through cracks and crinnes the giant would trip over.  The cat can explore alleys and byways which the giant has to barrel past or risk being entangled.  The cat isn’t exactly larger than life, and occasionally it will get itself lost, but it’s a sight more graceful than the giant.

In this metaphor, the giant is movies, and the cat is books.  A movie is huge, and striking, and powerful, but in the end it’s clumsy.  It’s difficult to gracefully put more than one plot arch in a movie, whereas books routinely have several.  However, while a great book can relay an awful lot from the writing, in the end, seeing it on the big screen is a totally different experience.

For instance? Thorin? 10x hotter than ever in a million years imagined.

Like, really, totally different.  Incomparable, even.  And that’s my point in this post.  A lot of people do a lot of complaining when a movie comes out, and they’ve made a deviation from the book. For instance, in The Hobbit, Bilbo and Thorin never have that awkward blossoming bromance going on.  And there certainly isn’t any overarching crazy white Orc (well, unless you’re a nerd and know that he’s part of the greater back story, if kind of resurrected).

Being a writer, one might think I’d be offended by this kind of restructuring and even canon changing.  Oddly, I was completely comfortable, and even admiring of it.  The fact is that if they had done the Hobbit verbatim  the first movie would have been disjointed.  It wouldn’t have had a solid arc, just the beginning of an arch that stopped midway, like a stone sticking in the air mid throw.  That would drive you crazy in real life, it drives us nutsoid in a plot arc.  We would have walked out going ‘what was the point of that?  It just sort of fizzled out…’

By inserting a distrust between Bilbo and Thorin, a need for a solid and undeniable proof of Bilbo’s ability to fufill is role in the company, we get a really solid beginning, middle, and ending.  Azog supplements that pull of trust.

How can you use this little epiphany for your writing though?  Simple.  Sometimes you think you’ve got a cat when you’ve got a giant.  Sometimes your cat turns into a giant on accident, or you just want to write a cat, but you’re making the cat too big.  The point is that we see very clearly how Peter Jackson and his writers pared away, pushed, pulled, added, and subtracted in order to get a very clear story arch.  Study that, and then emulate it.  Pare away your random little thread about the baker boy.  Cut out that aside about how your main character once frolicked in the rain with a horse and that that it would be grand to be a flower shop owner, especially if he’s now aiming to be an investment banker and hasn’t cared about flowers or rain in years.  (Ok, I can see a point where that might still be made relevant, but I think you get the idea.)

Peter Jackson had to trim the fat and make the hedges nice and neat for his giant of a film to be released.  We’re working with cats here, yes, but sometimes they’re big cats, and we still have to make sure they fit down the alleys we send them.

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Because Darn It, I Like It!!

Towards the end of Nanowrimo, I was needing words, and thus began to write a scene which I knew would never in a million years make it into the book which would come out of the editing.  The character is handed a sheet of questions and writes the answers down, one by one, thinking about the various ways he could answer them and how those answer impact him.

And truth be told, it’s a boring, unmarketable scene.  It’s not saying anything new, and to be honest it’s rehashing a lot of stuff we already know.

But here’s the thing: I loved writing that scene.  It was so much fun.  I was writing the first question out when I realized that this scene had no movement whatsoever.  But the answer to that question was already in my mind, and I really wanted to see what all would come out of this character’s mouth/pen.  So I kept writing.

Now, putting aside the fact that Nano goes for quantity and not quality, I still would have written this scene, solely based on the fact that I was having so much fun writing it.  I actually do it a lot – little outrigger scenes that get stuck in my head, contribute nothing to the story I’m writing, but give me the giggles.  So I’ll write entire pages because darn it, I like it!  My motto is that no word is ever wasted, no sentence a complete throwaway.  Why?  Well…

#3 Practice with putting words together

No scene is wasted, because as soon as you are putting the words to the page, you’re practicing your writing.  You are reminding your neural pathways how to type, how a sentence is structured, a certain word spelled.  This is more important than you might realize, because it’s easy to get rusty, even on something as deeply ingrained as writing.  Maybe not “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SPELL ‘YOU’ ANY MORE, HALP!!!” but your writing can definitely lose a bit of flow with a month or two of not practicing.  Your voice might be a touch jilted, or you just plain don’t have the focus to write (which is definitely part of practicing writing; practicing focus).

#2 Character or World Development

With the scene I was describing above, the main character was not a stranger to me.  But despite that, he still thought a few things which surprised me; how he felt about his brother, how reluctant he was to disclose his situation.  These are things I had an inkling of, I mean, the character is in my subconscious  but I had not yet had the chance to write those vague thoughts down.  This gave me that chance.  The other important thing the ‘useless’ scene gave me was the questionnaire which every student entering the Institute is given upon entrance.  Given that a good 50%-75% of the story revolves around this institute, and nearly every character has been a student there at some point in their lives, it’s kind of a good thing to know.  While I may never use the scene itself, I will very likely use that information some time in the series.

#3 That ‘useless’ scene might surprise you!

The biggest reason to keep writing on a scene that you feel is useless is that the scene you are thinking is never going to see the light of day, might darn well.  I once wrote a scene between two characters just for the heck of it.  Their dialogue was in my head and darn it, I saw a scene I liked and wanted to write down.  So I did.  Now it turns out, that scene is going to be an important part of one of the later books of the Athele Series, introducing and grounding a few new characters who have an impact on everything.  That useless scene I just wrote for fun turned out to be pretty useful after all!

So go ahead.  Write that supposedly useless scene.  It might surprise you!

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Sometimes Your Gut is WRONG

I had an interesting experience with the second book of The Cinereal Series.

You see, book 2 did not write itself nearly as easily as book 1.  Book 1 was a breeze.  It tripped off the tongue.  It just laid itself down and all I had to do was put it in a straight line.

But book 2 was hard.  You see, I wrote Book 1 thinking it was a stand alone novella, so I didn’t really plan, and I didn’t do all my visionary stuff of “Oh, and that’ll come back to bite them in the end!!”  I just wrote, and wound up with a handful of characters and a plot that was done but not finished.  There was still something going on, beneath the surface.

What the heck was wrong?  As I read through again, I realized that I’d set myself up for a sequel before page ten.  Way to go, me.

However, trusting my own subconscious  I started to write on the second book.  And at first it tripped off the fingers just like book one.

And then promptly ground to a halt.  What in the world was I doing!?  How did these characters know each other?  Where was this character going to come in use?  What was this character’s motivation and this one’s issue, and where was I GOING with all of this?  ACK! It was maddening.

I went back to book one, labored on because despite all the confusion I knew I had a good story brewing somewhere, but it came in fits and starts and I kept having to go back and check my information, my skeleton, and my inspirations, as well as research some of the character’s backgrounds before finally, creepingly, writing.

It came, and it came slowly.  Like molasses   In a freezer.  In the arctic.  At least, that’s how it felt: in reality whenever I sat down to write I made a respectable 1000 words.  But it felt SO HARD, and every time I thought about it or looked at it all I could see was the jumble in my head and thus, all I could think was “this is such a mess.”

Now, let me pause here to assure you that I’m not whining here.  I’m trying to get you into my head, or back into your head so that you’re in this feeling with me.

Finally I handed the manuscript to Michael and just said “oh it’s awful but you’ll tell me how to fix it.”

He read it.

“So, did you read it?”
“Yeah.  It’s fine.”
“What?  How?  No it’s not.”
“No, it’s fine.  Maybe a few sentence mishaps with wording, but it’s good.”

And that’s how that conversation went.  I didn’t believe him, so I went back, intent on ‘fixing’ it.  Only, I couldn’t find anything to fix.  The plot flowed one thing to the next, everyone had their motivation, everyone had their arc.  But my gut still said “SOMETHING IS WRONG KEEP LOOKING.”

Thankfully, my finely tuned Nanowrimo editor security measures, plus Michael’s continued assurance that “it all makes sense, duh.”  Stayed my hand long enough to enlist the help of my mother, who reads more than anyone I’ve ever met (burning through all five Game of Thrones books in 2 weeks) to tell me what was what.

I was shocked.  She liked book one, but told me, plain and simple, “Book 2 is better.  Like, way better.”

Say what?  Even now, my gut is going “GAH NO YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”

The point of this post is two fold:

#1 If you are NOT a beginning writer, and you have written something you hate, before you do anything drastic, get a first reader.  A sentence here, a paragraph there, no biggie.  But switching plot points and slash/burning pages might get you confused, or worse, losing really good material.  Ok, first readers are ALWAYS helpful, and maybe you’re too embarrassed to show your ‘this is terrible’ work to anyone.  Fine, at least take someone to coffee and run it by them before completely trashing it.  Give the idea a chance.

#2 Sometimes your gut is wrong.  After THREE people have given me a raving review of this second book, I’ve finally figured out that in reality, I’m getting a false reading.  As I said, there is NOTHING wrong with the piece.  I know it’s strong plot wise, I know it’s got the happening, I know it’s pretty awesome on the big reveal and darn it, I love the main character.  But if I’d followed my gut instinct, I would have trashed, or horribly twisted, the story and I don’t really think I could have done better.  So be suspicious.  Not dismissive.  Just suspicious.

Now, I’m bringing you this post because I have gotten the final confirmation that my gut was wrong: that being a shiny new contract with Lyrical Press to Publish Book 2 of The Cinereal Series, ‘Sword’s Blessings’.  Hooray!

Has your gut ever been ‘Just that wrong’?

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A Quick Analogy

I’m sorry to have been away for so long, but between a sudden influx of work (holidays, marketing and advertising job, you get the idea) and moving for the second time in as many months, I’ve had to stick mostly to quick bits on twitter, and have only the time for a brief update today.

I wanted to draw a quick analogy between moving house and writing a story.

First, you have the house/apartment itself.  It is bare, but it has structure, compartments, walls, and all the necessary rooms.  This is akin to the brainstorming of a story.  You sort of see the rough outline in your head, get a vague feeling for the world, and maybe think up some of the major plot points and themes.

Second, you move the furniture in.  These are similar to the characters.  They are the players in your grand scheme, your structure.  They might all match up, or they might be different as the sun and a rock.  If you got your characters from Wal-Mart you might have a rather peculiar story (though watching this video I would believe it if you ever have gotten a character from Wal-Mart.)  but if your furniture is from there it’s cool too.

Next, you take your boxes of stuff and get them in there.  These are the complications, complexities, flaws, idiosynchracies, challenges, trip ups, flares and flounces, tone and aura of your story.  They are what will make your home, and your story, undeniably yours.  Everyone has furniture.  A bed and a chair of some kind; whether you have a mattress on the floor or a nice canopy bed makes no difference, you still sleep in it.  Not everyone has a Tachikoma in a tiny fascinator hat  sitting on their night stand.

There is a good chance that I am a Ghost in the Shell fan.

Finally, you take all that stuff that you’ve gathered together over the years, and you put it all in it’s rightful place.  You neaten.  You decorate.  You Feng Shei if that’s your thing.  But the point is that you make it work, all together, within the frame of your apartment, and not just hilly nilly chilling in the boxes like about half of my stuff is still doing (sigh).

What’s your favorite analogy to writing a story?  Feel free to steal the idea and blog for yourself, I’d love to see it!

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Valeria Officially Released!

It’s here! It’s here!

 

Can you believe it!?   Valeria was released yesterday to the masses!  I’m so happy to finally give you the links to buy, rate, and review it!

This is my first novel, and my first chance to get my name out there and start generating interest in my writing as a novelist.  So that said, my goal isn’t to make money off this book.  My goal is to spread it like oil on a hot plate.  For the first few days, Lyrical Press is offering Valeria for a mere 1$.  1$ gets you a zip folder with epub and mobi formats as well as a PDF for your computer.  You can also get it at the normal outlets (amazon , itunes, and B&N) for $1.99!

I’d love you if you bought it.  I’d love even more if you’d take a moment to rate and review it anywhere you choose: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your blog, or even Goodreads.  I was so happy to see that Valeria‘s first reviewer gave it four stars out of five!  Especially they mentioned how well edited it was, and I have to agree, my editor Antonia Tiranth is AMAZING.

So that’s today!  I’m chugging along in Nanowrimo while getting ready for a weekend trip to Chicago, and I hope you are doing great with your week too!

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Why you should do Nanowrimo…Again!

Here’s the thing.  People are always trying to convince you to do Nanowrimo the first time.  But what if you’ve done it?  Heck, what if you’ve finished in time?  You’ve written your book, had your jollies, gotten the bragging rights and the swag to go with it.  Why should you bother doing it again?  Here’s a few compelling reasons why you should try it again this year, in the eleventh hour, so to speak.

#3 You know what you’re in for.  

Ok, we keep saying that being embroiled in the insanity of having no idea what’s going on is half the fun.  That’s true, but there’s something to be said for knowing what you’re doing the second time around.  You can plan your time better, already know your time commitment for your daily allotment (on a good day, I can manage it in an hour.) You already know where and how you write.  That’s a huge deal in making the experience smoother and more pleasant.

#2 No two years *have* to be the same!

Tried plotting last year?  Try pantsing.  My first year, I hardly touched the forums.  The next year I was all over the place.  While I lived in Peoria, I attended the nano write-ins every week.  Last year I was pretty lone wolf.  There are so many aspects to Nanowrimo that you really tailor your own experience.

#1 You can make it stronger, faster, better, you have the techn…er, skills.

Writing is about practice.  Lots and lots and lots of practice.  You’ve practiced it once, but there is always room for more practice.  Always.  So if you really want to sustain your upward learning momentum, you need to keep plugging away, and Nanowrimo is a great benchmark each year to see how your writing has improved and can improve further.

Are you a multiple year Nanoer?  How many years have you been at this insanity?  Have I missed a vital point?  Let us know in the comments!

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Ten Reasons You Should Try Nanowrimo! (part 2!)

Last time, I gave you five reasons to try out Nanowrimo for the first time!  This time, I’m going to give you five MORE!

#5 At the end, you have actually produced something!

When you take part in many things, you have less than when you started.  Paintball?  Less ammo.  Bungee Jumping?  Less money, probably.  Road race?  Less time and energy (well, sort of).  Now, that’s not to say these things aren’t cool or valuable.  You certainly get a lot of experience out of them.  But Nanowrimo is of a particular value, because once you’ve passed the finish line, you not only have the experience, you have a really solid manuscript on your hands, which you are free to edit and try your luck at publishing, or print and use as a doorstop, or even delete as if it had never happened.

Hopefully your manuscripts isn’t quite this big, though.

#4 Supporting Nanowrimo supports other awesome stuff!

While Nanowrimo is a fabulous thing to support, they also do a lot of outreach.  They build libraries for children, and focus on literacy and writing in schools, complete with an entire curriculum for young writers, and their own site (the YWP).  They lend out Alphasmarts to classrooms and gift teachers with tools to help them teach.  It’s awesome, and completely worth your support!

#3 SWAG.

Nanowrimo has some awesome swag.  Their sweaters have kept me warm for many a month (and confused many a person) and I have many of their fine shirts.  If you want to look cool and advertise your accomplishments to the world, that’s the way to go.

This particular bit of swag assisted me with the freezing weather in Korea… but not with doors three inches shorter than I am.

#2 It’s communal!

I mentioned that Nanowrimo is a social beast before, however this rule is somewhat different.  You see, writing a book is a gigantic undertaking.  It’s like the academic version of the ultramarathon.  The difference though, is that in an ultramarathon you’ve got your support team, maybe ten people, and you.  That’s it.  Sure there’s other runners, but you hardly see them.  In contrast, Nanowrimo is like a giant internet ant colony, with everyone tugging their own word count but also keeping track of everyone else, helping tug, repairing the tunnels, or just cheering.

#1 Licence to madness.

This is my absolute favorite part of Nano.  You see, when you are nanoing you have every right and even encouragement to just be insane.  To go crazy.  Toss in an explosion, make a person have a good old fashioned insanity episode, encourage your villain to monologue like you normally wouldn’t…. and the thing about that madness is that it makes editing a headache, but it also gives you a lot of awesome material to work with.  And in the end, that’s the point!

Ready the coffee and computer screens!

So there’s my ten reasons to try Nanowrimo.  You’ve got today and tomorrow to sign up!

How about it?  Have I convinced you?  Next time, we hit the GO button on Nanowrimo, and… guess what?  Valeria comes out in six days!

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Zombies, Writing, and You

Saturday I took part in the Omaha Zombie Walk.  It was a fabulous time, and it got me thinking of all the writing lessons we can learn from zombies.

I know, I know, it’s crazy, but bear with me!  Zombies have a lot to teach us about writing, if we can just get past their slightly crazed shuffle and desperate call for brains.  Don’t believe me?  Fair enough, let’s start.

#3 Anything in great numbers is Dangerous

Shufflin’ shufflin’

You have a manuscript.  And it’s a mess.  But there are 100 pages of writing saved onto a file or chilling out in a bound form or printed under your bed where no one can ever find it.  Ever.  EVER.  

Here’s the thing though.  One zombie is an easy kill.  I mean, it might not be fun to deal with but in the end you can grab a 2×4 and smack it in the head until it stops moving.  Two zombies, a little more challenging but still manageable.   100?  Not so much.  Even if they’re missing arms, legs, eyes and teeth they’re dangerous.  Very dangerous.

Words and pages are the same way.  One page of a novel is easy to ignore and pass over.  ”Oh, I started a novel but it didn’t pan out.”  But once you get up there, once you finish it, no matter how bad it is, your book is a force to be reckoned with.  It’s got power.  It’s got the potential to rip an unsuspecting civilian to shreds and reduce them to one of the hoard.  Yes, it may be a shambling mess, but the danger is still there.  Treat it with respect and don’t ever turn your back.

#2 Every day I’m shufflin’

You know the Zombie shuffle?  I saw about twenty different ways of doing it today.  The “one leg dragged behind” the “thriller” the “bent backwards sway” and the “herky jerky walk”.  While all special in their own charming way, and all of them are challenging, not to mention slow (especially in large groups) all of these walks have one thing in common.  If you keep doing them, they get you where you’re going.

That’s something a lot of writers I know struggle with.  Perseverance.  Often there will be huge bursts of inspiration and you’ll hear “I wrote ten pages today!” and then for the next few months, nothing.    No mater how slowly, if you do it, and you keep doing it, every day, you will get there.

A friend of mine made a tiny little goal: two pages a week.  That comes to maybe 1000 words in a week.  At first it was slow going and difficult.  But it’s been a few months.  Suddenly I glanced at the length of her document: 44 pages!  What in the world, when had that happened?  It was yet another reminder: baby steps… or in this case, zombie steps.  They may be small, but they’ll still get you there.

#1 BRAINSSSSS!

Brains.

Ah, brains.  Seems that every time you see a zombie you think BRAAAAINZ.  You see it every time you see a zombie, or when someone makes fun of zombies, or imitates a zombie, or shows a zombie in a game.  I mean, it’s just a zombie thing.  Zombies and Brains, peanut butter and jelly, Peas and carrots, cookies and milk, that sort of thing.

So how did we get this partnership?  Why, repetition of course!  In my time of being a zombie, I probably said “BRAAAAINS” more in the course of 45 minutes than I do the rest of the year.  Over and over again.

When you have a theme in your story, it should be the same way.  Hit that theme like the fist of an angry God.  Repeat it.  Over and over.  I mean, maybe not quite as much as a Zombie saying brains, but the lesson in clear.  If you pair two things enough, no matter how unlikely, soon they will be associated.

Anything I missed?  Have you been on a zombie walk yet?